[ The basketball legend was a champion not just on the court but
off it—through his groundbreaking activism for racial justice.]
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WHAT MADE BILL RUSSELL A HERO  
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Jemele Hill
July 31, 2022
The Atlantic
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_ The basketball legend was a champion not just on the court but off
it—through his groundbreaking activism for racial justice. _

, Bettmann / Getty

 

Not many people can make Charles Barkley, the former NBA MVP and
legendarily outspoken broadcaster, pipe down. But the NBA icon Bill
Russell, who died on Sunday aged 88
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once called Barkley and did just that.

“He called me. ‘Charles Barkley, this is Bill Russell.’ I said,
‘Oh hey, Mr. Russell,’” Barkley told me. “He said, ‘I need
you to shut the fuck up.’ I said, ‘Okay.’”

Russell had seen Barkley on television complaining about how much he
paid in taxes. Russell was displeased with Barkley’s comments.

“[Russell] said, ‘Son, let me tell you something,” Barkley said.
“‘You grew up poor. You went to public school, and I bet the
police came to your neighborhood when somebody called the cops.’ I
said, ‘Yes, Mr. Russell.’ He said, ‘Somebody was paying those
people and you didn’t have any money. I don’t ever want to see
your Black ass on TV complain about taxes ever again.’ And I never
did.”

Russell’s record—11 NBA championships as a player and a coach with
the Boston Celtics—came to define winning. More than that, though,
his fierce dedication to speaking out against racial injustice, his
deep sense of integrity and righteousness, have long been considered
the gold standard for athlete activism. Today, many Black athletes
revere Russell and regard him as their north star.

In 2018, when I was a sports journalist with ESPN, I asked the late
Kobe Bryant [[link removed]] what he had learned from
Bill Russell about leadership. Russell had been the NBA’s first
Black head coach, while he was still a player—and he had experienced
painful and humiliating racist abuse, even as he built the Celtics
into a powerhouse. Bryant, who died in a helicopter crash in 2020
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He was dealing with a lot of racial issues in Boston. Stories of
people throwing things at him during the game and yelling crazy things
to him on the court. So [I asked him] how did you deal with it? He
said, “Well, I internalized it. I felt like the best thing I could
do was use that as fuel, as opposed to simply having an emotional
outburst at them. I decided to use that as energy to enhance my
performance.”

In an article for _SLAM_ magazine in 2020
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Russell wrote: “The Boston Celtics proved to be an organization of
good people––from Walter Brown to Red Auerbach, to most of my
teammates. I cannot say the same about the fans or the city.”
Russell endured their calling him “baboon,” “coon,” and
“nigger” during games. When Celtics fans were polled about how the
team could increase attendance, Russell recalled, more than half
responded: “have fewer Black guys on the team.” And he related
how, while he and his family were living in Reading, Massachusetts, a
predominantly white town north of Boston, “bigots broke into the
house, spray-painted ‘Nigga’ on the walls, shit in our bed.”

The experience only seemed to make Russell more determined to use his
voice to bring awareness to this country’s deep-seated racial
problems. In 1967, he took part in the Cleveland Summit, a gathering
of prominent Black athletes organized by the great NFL running back
Jim Brown. Russell was among those who stood in solidarity with the
boxer Muhammad Ali, who had been stripped of his heavyweight title and
faced charges for refusing to serve in the Vietnam War.

[Bill Russell about to dunk.]
New York Daily News Archive / Getty

Long before LeBron James posted a picture
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his 2012 Miami Heat team wearing hoodies to memorialize Trayvon
Martin, the Black teenager who had been wearing a hoodie when he was
killed by a vigilante who claimed self-defense, Russell was marching
with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and speaking out about the treatment
of Black people in America in the 1950s and ’60s.

Long before the University of Missouri football team threatened a
boycott
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in 2015, because of the university president’s mishandling of racism
on campus, Russell oversaw the first integrated basketball camp in
Jackson, Mississippi, after the assassination of civil rights leader
Medgar Evers in 1963. Russell went ahead with the initiative despite
death threats.

And long before NBA players forced the league to halt play in 2020
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police shooting of Jacob Blake
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29-year-old Black resident of Kenosha, Wisconsin, Russell had led a
boycott that was joined by his Black Celtics teammates and the Black
players on the St. Louis Hawks, after a restaurant in Lexington,
Kentucky, refused to serve Russell and his teammates before the
exhibition game. (The game went on without them, with only the white
players participating.)

According to Gary Pomerantz’s 2018 book, _The Last Pass: Cousy,
Russell, the Celtics, and What Matters in the End_, Russell responded
to a reporter’s question about the boycott by saying:

One of the ways the American Negro has attempted to show he is a human
being is to demonstrate our race to the people through entertainment,
and thus become accepted. I am coming to the realization that we are
accepted as entertainers, but that we are not accepted as people in
some places. Negroes are in a fight for their rights—a fight for
survival—in a changing world. I am with these Negroes.

That sense of solidarity with other Black athletes never left Russell,
even after his basketball career was over. As a homage to Colin
Kaepernick’s protest, Russell posted a photo
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himself taking a knee while wearing the presidential medal of freedom
that he’d received from President Barack Obama in 2011. (Full
disclosure: I am a producer of the ESPN documentary series that
Kaepernick and the director Spike Lee are making about the former
quarterback’s banishment from pro football.) When the NBA players
didn’t play after Blake’s shooting, Russell tweeted
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proud he was of them for “standing up for what is right.”

Although players of this generation have largely been spared the same
humiliating, painful racism that Russell experienced as he rose to
become the NBA’s first Black superstar, his influence is
foundational to Black athlete activism.

“It’s easy to be woke when you’re making $40 or $50 million a
year,” Barkley told me. “I got a lot of respect for the guys who
do speak up now. But when you’re making $5,000 a year, and living in
the America that he was at the time, that’s what makes him a
hero.”

_Jemele Hill [[link removed]] is a
contributing writer at The Atlantic._

* Bill Russell
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* civil rights activists
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